The Slow and Boring Path

Try, try again

Too many nonprofits try to engineer failure out of their fundraising. Thing is, if you aren't failing, you aren't moving forward. An effective fundraising program always tries new things — big ideas, small ideas, money-saving ideas, even dumb ideas that need to be put to rest.

The slow and boring trick is to fail well — fail in ways that yield good learnings without betting the farm on unproven ideas. You do that by rigorously testing. Start with a clear hypothesis, make sure you select the right groups for the test and the control — and then put a lot of brainpower into analyzing the results.